Taft Crowley is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science. His subfield concentrations are political economy and comparative politics. Through these lenses Taft focuses on issues of migration, land reform, demographic imbalances, and the politics of LGBTQ Americans. His current project aims to understand the connection between land reform and migration in Central America. This project hopes to better explain the constraints and choices of potential migrants in the Northern Triangle, with the hope that such work can better inform policy choices in migrant origin and destination states. Taft’s other work has sought to understand the politics resulting from male surpluses in India and changing group solidarity within cis-gay men in the US.

Emily Kracht is an Anthropology graduate student, specializing in Archaeology. Emily studies the Indigenous peoples of the early Caribbean, but has broad interests in ceramic technology, archaeometry, marine adaptations, exchange networks, and outreach. She specifically focuses on archaeometric methods including ceramic analysis, stable isotope analysis, and radiocarbon dating. She uses these techniques to understand migration, colonization, social identity, and exchange of these early peoples. Emily’s current research studies how the elemental composition of pottery can be used to track early exchange and trade networks among regional and microregional centers.

Emily holds a BA and BS in Anthropology and Chemistry, respectively, from the University of Florida (UF). She also has spent time as a lab technician and collections assistant at UF and the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, Florida.

Esaú is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography at UC Santa Barbara and part of the Population Health in Geography (PHiG) research group. He received a B.A. in Political Science from CSU Bakersfield in 2018 and a Master's in Public Policy from UC Riverside in 2020. Esaú's research focuses on the convergence of immigration, health, policy, and spatial data science. His current work explores population dynamics and spatial patterns in the origin and destination of Mexico-U.S. migration flows.  

Emily Fox is a PhD student in the department of Sociology with a doctoral emphasis in Feminist Studies. Her research considers how gender (particularly masculinities), sexuality, and other aspects of identity shape friendship experiences. In her Master's thesis, she used nationally representative data to show that young adults' reported closeness to their best friend is not only stratified by gender, but also ethnoracial identity. In another on-going project, she uses original survey data to understand how adults in the US (including asexual and/or aromantic adults) differentiate platonic, romantic, and sexual attraction and make sense of these relationship "categories." Moving forward, she plans to qualitatively investigate how men create, maintain, understand, and benefit from their friendships with each other.

Yifan (Flora) He is an environmental social scientist and doctoral student at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara. She studies rural land governance in the Global South using a combination of political science theory, causal inference methods, and geospatial tools. Current projects include the relationship between rural out-migration and land governance in South America, and the social and environmental impacts of collective tenure regimes in Brazil.

Prior to UCSB, she worked as a social scientist at Conservation International. She holds a Bachelor of Social Sciences from the University of Hong Kong in 2015 and a Master of Science in conservation ecology and environmental informatics from the University of Michigan in 2017.

Grants, Awards and Distinctions:
Schmidt Family Foundation Research Accelerator Award. $8,000.

James D. Kline Fund for International Studies. $5,000.

Michael J. Connell Memorial Fund Research Award. 2022-2024. Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara. Assessing socioeconomic and environmental impacts of land use restrictions in Indigenous lands in Brazil. PI. $15,000.

Environmental Justice Research Fund. 2022. Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara. $1,000.

Individualized Professional Skills Grant. 2022.  University of California, Santa Barbara. $1,000.